The funny thing is that the new site was built and hosted by Isohunt, a potential Pirate Bay competitor. The Old Pirate Bay is a useful site, too! Instead of just mirroring the original, the Old Pirate Bay has a functional search engine, working magnet links, and all of the old pages. To boot, there's even new content being uploaded all the time.

It's hard to guess what the company's intentions are for the Old Pirate Bay, though it sounds sincere enough in the announcement:

As you all probably know, the beloved Pirate bay website is gone for now. It will be missed. It will be always remembered as the pilgrim of Freedom and possibilities on the Web. It's the symbol for a whole generation of the internet users.

In it's honor we are making oldpiratebay.org search. We, the Isohunt.to team, copied the base of the PirateBay in order to save it to the generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten.

So torrent on, you freedom-loving scallawags. Because you can take the Pirate Bay off the web, but you can never destroy the pioneering site's legacy. [Isohunt via Venturebeat]